Comparing Quantcast to Alexa

Alexa is often used to identify the most popular websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. However, they don’t provide actual traffic numbers while other websites like QuantCast have these estimates. There are many valid use cases to leverage these rankings but I would guess that beyond the first 10k to 50k results, it gets quite inaccurate. Both services collect this data differently and they both provide a top 1 million list so today I decided to compare these two data sets against each other and figure out their differences in website ranking.

Quantcast and Alexa in one Table

I really wanted to provide traffic numbers for the Quantcast results and the million list does not have that level of detail. Thus, I was forced to do a little web scraping. I focused on the most popular 50k websites and the result is a decent sized JSON rendered on a HTML table with sorting and search functionality built using a small JavaScript UI library called W2UI. It’s interesting to see the results or the disparity between Alexa and Quantcast estimates. Have you found anything interesting in this data comparison?

External:

Difference between Alexa, Google, and Quantcast
Alexa Top 10,000 DNS Marketshare
Accuracy of data for alexa and quantcast
Alexa versus Quantcast